The Woods

Heather Sager

I’m not proud I bullied Elsa. But I’ve changed. The woods still stand outside town the same way—they still catch the wobbly yellow light of late day in their limbs. The change I’m speaking of happened in late summer. The trees still wore their full green bluster, but the corn rows had begun to stagger high up. School had started. We were cursing, miserable, on account the air conditioners hadn’t kicked on. Weekends went by in a long swelter. Bobby, my boyfriend, had made a birch-bark canoe. Perhaps that’s why I teased Elsa—because of Bobby. Amber, leave Elsa alone, Bobby said. They were friends, Elsa and Bobby. But not boyfriend-girlfriend like Bobby and me.

Bobby had just turned sixteen—he was one year older than both of us. He lived all summer like an Indian in the woods. He had a house—his dad’s—but spent all his time getting sun-browned. And there was Elsa going trekking with her archaeologist tools, digging for Indian things. I hated that Bobby was supposed to be at my window, knock-

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ing, but instead was in the pines humming and whittling. Bobby knew I wanted my boys strong, to wear cut-off jeans and have muscled legs. Bobby was strong—but his legs were skinny. And he wore nice clothes, then dirtied them. When he found that mound of dirt—an earthwork, he called it—in the woods, he went straight to Elsa. I don’t know if he went to her window. But as for the earthwork, it was all he could talk of! At the café Bobby had mad ecstasy in his eyes. He didn’t touch my hand, which I set down near his Coke, just waiting. He believed the earthwork was a genuine Sioux burial ground, and that Elsa could dig it—responsibly, of course, after contacting the appropriate authorities. In the café Bobby drank Coke and took bites from a crabapple he just plucked. His pants dripped from wading in the stream. (Back home he had a manual on frontier life, Indian treasures, and it taught him to chart all the streams.) Then he did squeeze my hand, and said, “It’s a real find, Amber!”

The day it happened, not long after the earthwork had been discovered, my old boyfriend, Jordi, went duck hunting with his dad and Stu, their neighbor. Bobby said it wasn’t fair to hunt—it was too early in the season, and some ducks were molting, couldn’t take flight. Bobby was in the woods that day.

Elsa wasn’t eating. Hadn’t been eating.

For weeks, apparently.

Elsa, with her melancholy brown eyes and pug nose. Now I can’t stand to look at Jordi anymore.

On account of the accident: was it I who sent Elsa to the woods? Tearful, I went too. We heard the shot and ran, just knowing. Bobby had been picking Indian corn. He stood in Stu’s crosshairs. Elsa got there first. She just knew.

I remember: Jordi looked at me jealously when leaving the café.

The Dakota Sioux made beautiful vases, I’ve since learned. The Sioux buried their things with them when they died. They buried vases, delicately shaped with pigments depicting births, deaths, lives. The earthworks could contain anything—skulls, bones, vases, cooking utensils. But really they were just shallow graves, shallow graves sitting too close to the corn.

I touched Elsa’s face. It was an accident, I told her. She didn’t stir. She lay where she had passed out, after seeing Bobby like that (head cracked, bloodied) and Stu run off for the police. Elsa didn’t believe me. She didn’t come to, acting like it was murder. Her pug nose, her head in the

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dirt. An unexplained softness came over me. I thought, on account of starvation and Bobby, she was dead. I touched her cheek, not thinking. But when I touched her cheek, her eyes opened. A wind brushed my face. Sun split the trees and wind cooled us.

Bobby’s canoe waited, still tied to a tree. The clear stream gurgled. The green oaks kissed the convex lid of blue sky.